The Fractured Tower

Throughout the years, scholars had spent time debating the moral implications of sapient monster civilizations. There was an argument to be made there. They had language. They had culture. The tower let them build without erasing their work. It wasn’t exactly inaccurate to say they were the true denizens of the tower and that humanity were the interlopers outside of Floor 0.

Most climbers tended to look at it in simpler terms. The elves were monsters. When they died, they released anima, just like every other monster. Only humans didn’t do that. As far as being sapient went, there was no denying it was true, but the fact that every elf, without hesitation, attempted to kill any non-elf they came across made it pretty easy to justify fighting back.

Some scholars still argued that they had a right to defend their territories, but the fact was that Sorin had personally razed elf—and other sapient monster species—settlements to the ground, only for it to spring right back up a few days later. Destroyed buildings were whole again. Wardrobes were full of clothes. Smithies were full of feather steel. The whole population simply appeared out of nothing, like it had always been there.

That, more than any other argument, was what allowed Sorin to attack the elven town with a clean conscience. Knowing what he did now about the tower’s alternate reality, he even understood some of the mechanism behind everything resetting back to baseline over and over again.

That was why he didn’t feel the slightest bit of guilt when he opened his assault with a massive conflagration that lit up the look-out posts near the edge of their town. Six trees with elves weighing down their branches became pillars of fire, killing a few elves in the process. Most of them jumped clear of the flames and landed unharmed where, predictably, they immediately started trying to kill Sorin back.

The key to assaults like this was extreme maneuverability. Sorin had to strike like lightning, kill a handful of targets, and move on before he got swarmed. Wide area damage spells were also important, but since his anima wasn’t endless, he limited himself to Force Weaver. Its limited range was less of a problem since there were always new targets no matter where he went.

For a normal climber, or even for a normal team of climbers, assaulting a town was tantamount to suicide. A hundred or more elves would inevitably kill everyone who dared to approach, and given their propensity for using bows and magic that manipulated plants, they were very good at doing exactly that.

Unfortunately for them, Sorin was too fast and too strong to be tied down. Force Weaver easily ripped apart any vines attempting to entangle him under the enemy druids’ command. Nets thrown at him were dodged or shredded. His constant change in speed as he raced from one objective to the next made it hard for the elves to get a bead on him, and when a lucky arrow did strike him, it either bounced off his body entirely or left barely more than a scratch that vanished within seconds.

All the while, elves died. He killed them in tree stands. He killed them on the ground. He met a trio of aeromancers in the sky for approximately three seconds, the results of which were him gaining a bit more anima and a shower of gore splattering on the clay roof tiles of a house below their battle.

There are never any young elves either, he noted. Every town is always fully composed of adult, combat-ready elves. It’s actually kind of weird when you think about it. I’ve seen plenty of baby monsters when raiding nests or camps, but never an elf that’s not full-grown, never a cook or a carpenter or literally anyone who can’t hold a weapon and fight back.

Yet they weren’t stupid. They had a language, albeit one that was more akin to musical instruments than words as he understood them. They communicated with each other, coordinated their attacks, and covered others’ retreats when they were overwhelmed.

In the end, though, they were still monsters. Soulprints formed in their bodies. Anima was released upon their deaths. New elves appeared from nothing to replenish their ranks. Maybe if they didn’t attack everything on sight, things would have been different, but that wasn’t the reality of the situation.

Sorin killed every last one of them. Normally, multiple teams needed to cooperate to accomplish such a feat, and they were richly rewarded for the effort in raw material, finished goods, and soulprints. Sadly, all that went to waste. The bars of feather steel were probably the most valuable material in the town, but it was too bulky for him to carry in any reasonable volume, and he was on a time limit, besides.

The real reward was the anima, just barely enough to push him to rank 26. That finally freed up the room in his soulspace to absorb Eyes of Light, which functioned as an incredibly superior version of Blind Sense, but only when illuminated by natural light. That was a significant drawback, but Sorin had plans to work around it.

He wanted the range and fidelity from it and was willing to sacrifice everything else, including the weaknesses. Keen Sight and Horizon Watcher provided many of the components needed, and Eyes of Light made up the framework to finally mix them together without losing what made them useful in the first place.

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Sorin stood in the ruins of the elven town, surrounded by corpses, burning trees, and billowing dust from collapsed buildings. Dimly, he retained awareness of all that, but his focus was in his own soulspace. He worked for twenty minutes or so, first reviewing what he wanted to make and confirming the soulprints he had would work, then breaking and reforming them into the pattern he wanted.

When he finished, a new C-rank painting appeared in his soulspace. Known simply as Observer, it depicted a landscape that was so painfully hyperreal that Sorin flinched back from looking at it. He couldn’t just see it with his eyes. He could hear the wind in it, feel the vibrations in the dirt, and sense the subtle strength of the mountains in the background.

Outside his soulspace, the world took on a whole new dimension. It was Tremor Sense and Echo Trace and Dark Vision, Aquatic Vision, Blind Sense, Earth Sense, and everything else, all twisted around until it formed an unholy amalgamation that was simply absolute awareness of his surroundings.

It wasn’t unbeatable. Notably, it did very little to pierce the stealth soulprints that might be used against him, but if something moved within a thousand feet in any direction, including beneath his feet, Sorin knew about it. More importantly for his current needs, Observer had an active component that let him see much farther than what he was passively aware of.

He pushed, focusing the soulprint to sweep the forest around him for a mile in every direction. More elves. A weirdly high amount of bears? Standard forest biome monster spread. A few dragon kin in a camp near the edge of elven territory. No abbey yet.

Even though it was only for a minute, the soulprint left Sorin’s head throbbing. Observer really needed to be paired with a mental fortitude soulprint if it was going to be used this way. Even the passive awareness was a constant onslaught trying to parse everything it poured into him. Fortunately, there was a solution for that on hand.

One of the reasons mind augmenting soulprints were so rare below C-rank was that monsters provided better than ninety-nine percent of the available stock, and weak monsters tended to be animalistic or brutish humanoids. Floor 12 was still low to be seeing C-rank soulprints, but it wasn’t impossible to find a few D-rank mind enhancers among the more civilized elven monsters.

Unfortunately, it was still rare. Sorin had sensed no soulprints among the dead monsters in this town, but he didn’t have to look too hard to find the next one. Although he wasn’t willing to go too far out of his way on his trip north to the ruin, he was still able to hit three more towns, resulting in better than a thousand kills between those locations and all the wandering patrols that tried to ambush him. That resulted in a handful of sensory soulprints, two separate balance enhancers, a specially padded pouch full of potions, an enchanted hair comb, and a powerful D-rank soulprint known as Way of the Leaf, which functioned similarly to Water Bond and Earth Warder, except for living plant life.

What he was looking for was a common elf soulprint called Focusing Mirror, which created a simplistic secondary mind that could be devoted to tasks that didn’t require a lot of higher reasoning skills. It wasn’t the best mind soulprint in the tower, but it was a good foundation for building up the mental acumen needed to function at the higher echelons of power.

All the killing got him a third of the way to rank 27, which wasn’t bad for the amount of time he’d spent on it. With a bit of luck, he’d push through that barrier before he hit Floor 13, but he wasn’t going to go out of his way to ensure it happened. The extra soulspace room would be nice, but it wasn’t necessary.

Sorin continued searching throughout the night, not stopping to eat or rest in his haste. Three times, he spotted teams of climbers not too far away. Twice, he bypassed them without slowing down, but the third time, he noted they were struggling against a pair of hawks with twenty-foot wingspans that kept divebombing the humans and then retreating above the canopy.

Sorin killed one with a lance of kinetic energy, which proved to be enough of an advantage for the team to take down its mate without further assistance. Once he was satisfied that no one was going to die, he left the climbers behind so that he didn’t steal any additional anima from them. They were going to need it if they wanted to survive the floor, though he suspected it was more an issue of the team being poorly equipped to handle flying monsters than just being too weak.

The abbey appeared at the edge of his range a few hours before sunrise. He’d been weaving back and forth, trying to broaden his reach so that he didn’t bypass the ruin completely, but even when he could ‘see’ a mile or more in any direction, it was still easy to miss. He’d gone right past it on his first lap and lost several hours circling back once he’d become convinced that he was too far north.

Finally, though, the ruin loomed before him. The abbey stuck out of the forest like a rotting, mangled tooth, a hundred feet tall and missing half its walls. It was coated in a layer of moss and creeper vines that did their best to plug the holes, but which couldn’t hide the inside of the enormous building. Where its front door should have been was merely an empty archway.

A sense of foreboding hung off the abbey like a physical shroud, but Sorin wouldn’t be discouraged so easily. He pushed through it, mentally brushing away the tower’s warning as he strode into the darkness. If the reports were to be believed—they’d been incomplete or outright wrong enough times that he didn’t take anything for granted—the abbey itself was only the first part of this ruin.

The real danger wasn’t the abandoned building, but the catacombs beneath it. Paired with that danger was the prize he was seeking, a cache of tower-forged loot inside the ruin heart, and all of it guarded by an amphibious, hemokinetic frog the size of a cottage.

Before that, though, were its caretakers: elves with crimson eyes and coal-black hair. Unlike their woodland kin, they shunned the forest above in favor of their underground lair. Strangely, no one ever made an argument in favor of the demonic elf civilization’s continued existence.

Maybe it’s all the scales, he thought with a wry grin. Or the horns. Demonic elves just don’t look enough like humans to count, I guess.

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